@techreport{NBERw16361,
title = "The Institutional Causes of China's Great Famine, 1959-61",
author = "Xin Meng and Nancy Qian and Pierre Yared",
institution = "National Bureau of Economic Research",
type = "Working Paper",
series = "Working Paper Series",
number = "16361",
year = "2010",
month = "September",
doi = {10.3386/w16361},
URL = "http://www.nber.org/papers/w16361",
abstract = {This paper investigates the institutional causes of China's Great Famine. It presents two empirical findings: 1) in 1959, when the famine began, food production was almost three times more than population subsistence needs; and 2) regions with higher per capita food production that year suffered higher famine mortality rates, a surprising reversal of a typically negative correlation. A simple model based on historical institutional details shows that these patterns are consistent with the policy outcomes in a centrally planned economy in which the government is unable to easily collect and respond to new information in the presence of an aggregate shock to production.},
}